Search Engine Optimisation

Optimising your SEO strategy and website for multiple locations isn’t, on the whole, that easy. As with any strategy Google is always changing the goal posts you need to address and you will often require the help of developers for complete optimisation.

This multi-location SEO guide is designed to be your one-stop guide to help you understand where to start and what could be missing from your strategy (as a minimum).

What is Multi-Location SEO?

Multiple Site or Multi Location SEO is search engine optimisation for businesses with multiple locations of brick ‘n’ mortar stores / offices which want to appear well in search.

Search engines, like Google, want to customise search to users. To this end when a user searches for a particular store or brand they are today likely to find a stack of local stores for that brand appear in search results – this is known as the “local pack”. This is matched off only the brand names.

It’s also more relevant for the growing Voice Search trend where users are searching using terms such as “_____ near me” and potentially being given a map again or directions to the local store.

Multi-location SEO works for any number of locations from 5 to 5000 and even 50,000 if done correctly. Franchises such as McDonalds use it too, so don’t get hung up on whether these strategies can work for you.

1 – Site Structure

As with any website, site structure and more particularly URL structure is one of the keys to search success. It can also be one of the first points to failure.

The first rule here is that whilst you can have an index of all your locations on a single page you should never simply have a single page of all your locations acting as your multi-location page. User’s will find it complicated, annoying and frustrating – but search engines will just wonder what the hell is going on.

The best solution all round is to have each location on it’s own page, or rather set of pages where relevant. Here is an example of how this works:

As you see this structure offers a clean and simple approach, it would be easy for users to remember and easy to replicate by store.

If you are multi-national, or multi-state, as well as multi-location then perhaps skipping a location index with a complete index and simply having a search would be of more use to users. However I would suggest a url setup as follows:

intl-store.com/country/state/ < you could still have a state index if neededintl-store.com/country/state/location < individual location page

Importantly, do not create a separate domain or sub-domain for each location in your business. It many cases a country based approach is ideal, however beyond this a centralised approach is the optimal SEO strategy. With decentralisation of locations websites comes reduced “link juice” and Domain Authority, this should always be cemented centrally to the main brand website to ensure growth and sustained authority.

2 – Location Page Structure

Read this section carefully this is where all the real secrets to success are for on-site success with multi-location seo success!

With each individual location page, every location should have the same specific information and in the same format. This is to say the same pieces of information appear on each page but it should be unique for each location.

Those pieces of information are these (though may not be limited to):

The complete Location name, address and phone number (NAP). In the correct format as per Google requirements!

Location-specific content, and lots of it! This means testimonials, access information, photos, opening times and offers.

Complete descriptions of how to get to your business using key transport infrastructure (whether that is buses, trains or motorways).

Specific on-page content (text) about the location, even if this is only a few sentences make the content unique to the page.

Unique location focused Meta Tags (title and description), this is what appears in search and whilst has little value for rankings it is what users see and hear (voice search).

Did I mention use amazing images? (and maybe video too!)

With all the above you will have a really keen advantage over your competitors in 95% of cases. Most will just roll out the same content to every page, just changing opening times and thats about it – so always go the extra mile for your users.

Here is where you can go the extra mile for your users.

Just like search engines, user appreciates the information, but they find it hard to find so formatting is key – put information where they can find it easily, use clear heading (use styling and not h1 tags all over the shop – remember you can only have one h1 tag on a page).

Next up, remember that voice search is a growing trend and you need to write naturally. No one talks without taking a breath. So, keep your information simple and remember you want search engines to be able to strip it out easily.

This brings us neatly to a BIG TIP, implement microformats! I have bleated on about microformats and structured data for years and exploited it’s worth for clients. Today we are seeing with voice search exactly how that works for everyone overall. Using Schema.org you will be able to implement LocalBusiness Structured Data information (among other should you decide) and make it much easier for search engines to find the relevant information on your location pages, data that can be served immediately with search to users – potentially increasing your rankability and voice searchability.

Handy SEO Tips

All the above may have you itching to get started, but before you do a few words of caution.

1) Don’t create a ton of location pages for areas you don’t operate in, as a rule of thumb only create a page if you have an office locally and can put an address to it.

2) Don’t create several pages for one location and try to keyword stuff them (eg /seo-manchester /seo-in-manchester and /best-seo-manchester … just create one page for each location and let the content on the page do the work, several pages will simply decrease any ranking juice.

3 – Optimise Google My Business & Bing Places

It is important that across the two big search engines you own your locations and brand, the way to do this is claiming your locations using Google My Business and Bing Places.

These operate in much the same fashion, and importantly have feeds across other sites and into the vast mobile world. This means that almost every person carries this search within their pockets, searching for your brand or products could mean finding your local store … or your competitors. Caring for your locations on these platforms could mean the difference between a sale or not.

Here are my top tips to optimise these platforms.

Ensure all information is accurate, spelt correctly and as comprehensive as possible. (fill every box, category and attribute if you can). Ensure your name, address, phone number (NAP) is in the correct Google/Bing format.

Link directly to your local page.

Upload photos regularly of the store, upload videos to where possible.

Ask your customers to review you on GMB. (this is shown to increase the incidence of GMB showing in search).

Turn on Messaging through GMB, allowing customers to talk to you via GMB.

Don’t neglect your GMB/BP presence ever, update them regularly (if there is a lot, do them on a cycle).

Handy SEO Tip

Always make sure your local business is verified, if you notice it ever ‘drops off’ claim it again. It is rare to see a non-verified business appear directly in search of a non-brand search, verification will increase your chances of appearing in local search.

If you want to know more about optimising Google My Business, check out Neil Patels article on the subject.

4 – Build Local Citations

Local Citations are in effect the links/citations from large scale directory-type websites offering guides to areas or the such. A good example of this type of website is Yelp or TripAdvisor – there are also industry-specific directories which can provide citations, as can local news publications.

Building localised citations with links towards the Location Pages, not the main website page, is a key way of indicating to search engines this is the main page for this town, city or region.

Often you will see citation pages appear directly in search for certain types of search, for example “plumbers in manchester”, “photographers in manchester” or “local restaurants” – these are all likely to turn up some type of citation website. Each listing a business with a possible link back to that businesses website.

As with GMB and BP (previously mentioned), you should optimise citations using the following steps:

Ensure all information is accurate, spelt correctly and as comprehensive as possible. (fill every box, category and attribute if you can).

Link only to your location page.

Upload photos regularly of the store, upload videos to where possible.

Ask your customers to review you if appropriate on the platform (mainly for Yelp type platforms)

Update your profiles on a regular basis, this is likely to increase your rankings within the database.

5 – Build Localised Content

On-Site – This step is more common for single location SEO than for multi-location SEO. However, you will always want to produce specific content which meets the user’s expectations and this will always be local to a page – in particular, if they land there or navigation quickly to a page.

With this in mind, each location page should be highly localised. Offers should be specific and any blogs shown should be applicable to that location. My own preference is to also have specific blogs written for each location if possible or each region, making content even more specific and improving the local seo of these pages further – as well as the user experience.

Off-site / Link building – As with any website, the links your website can attain can help to improve your rankings. This is no different with local SEO.

Indeed, it is often much clearer to see the results of a great link building strategy within a localised niche than it is non-localised or link building on more generic terms. This is because local search often reacts faster with ranking changes and there is less competitions often (though this isn’t always the case), this means being local and building local authority links can quickly improve your local rankings.

The best places as always are industry website, blogs and longterm influencers, but other great places to look at for links include news publications and local events. Ensuring links remain local and industry-led is the key to success. Don’t forget the links must always lead to the location page, this should then have a positive effect on your rankings.

Conclusion

Multi-location SEO isn’t an easy game, it isn’t a quick game and it all starts by getting your website in order.

Once you’ve done that move on to your externals.

But always remember user experience is key, keep things consistent and if you’ve a lot of locations this will be a long road but it will be worth it.

I don’t swear often on my blog, but perhaps that means I’ve got your attention. I hope so because that may mean you’ll read the next few hundred words and remember them for the next while…

If there is nothing else you take away from this article here are the take aways, right now upfront!

Links don’t pass 100% value of a page’s worth to the page which is being linked or to which it is being redirected. There is a dampening effect on both a link and/or redirect (generally considered to be 0.85).

This effect is a compound effect. So if you have an external link to a site which is then redirected twice, you could see 0.85, 0.85, 0.85 in a best case scenario – but not all redirects and links are considered equal and so this may vary and you could come off worse than this!

Reduce the chan as far as you can, if you can replace the first link in the example above to the correct url do it! if not go back to the start of your redirect chain… don’t have redirect chains… they suck.

Why Redirect Chains Suck?

PageRank is a factor you will likely have heard of if you are at all involved in organic search. It’s something I was never really into as a metric, it was simply the value of a link and page (though i’d argue there were better metrics) and well it was always out of date, plus rarely updated to the ‘public’. Today PR is part the wider factors used in search still, a very minor factor, though I always thought this was always the case.

Any how, why am I talking about PageRank?

Well PageRank is where link value is measured, it’s where the previously mentioned dampening effect comes from. It was first mentioned in the first patent for PR by Google.

So with the general metric in the patent set to 0.85, and with links and redirects alike able to compound this effect we can start to see that multiple links and redirect chains in particular can cause big issues for ranking (because afterall the more rankings are dampened the less it’s worth to search).

But there is more to this than just this one little consideration…

Redirect chains have other issues…

Redirect chains cause search bots big issues, after 4 “jumps” (redirects) search bots basically die, they stop their crawl attempt and give up. It’s the end game and game over. For web browsers (almost all of them) it’s after 5 jumps. This means you can have 20 jumps if you really want and in theory it would pass some micro value (at least in theory) but the reality is search engines will never see that value, and users will never get to that page and instead be served a 500 server error.

Lessons To Learn

Read the take aways at the top of this article for the key lessons.

But the top lesson is to reduce any redirects, you will thank me if you ever ever have to migrate a large website. There is nothing as painful as a multi-thousand page website needing redirects created where that are many-more thousand redirect chains that need unpicking first… its painful technically but it will be painful on the bank of the client too.

The increase in voice search may have been well publicised over the last couple of years, but there’s another search functionality that’s been increasing in popularity too: visual search.

According to research from ViSenze, over 75% of customers have been inspired to purchase products based on image and video content. This highlights just how important image-based search should be for digital marketers.

A report by Jumpshot and Moz in 2017 supports this, discovering that approximately 27% of all searches across ten major products were images. Additionally, Pinterest enjoyed a year-on-year growth of 140% following the launch of its Lens visual search functionality, in February 2017.

We live in a world where our visual search methods are impressive: not only can we search with images, but we can also search for part of an image, search with our cameras, and even via augmented reality.

Combine this with the rising number of visual search applications for e-commerce, and you’ll find that this search method has become a powerful tool with huge potential for retailers.

It’s not difficult to see why visual search could continue to become even more popular. After all, visual search is incredibly useful for shoppers who are looking for an item but don’t know how to find it by doing a regular search.

For these types of people, visual search will reduce the number of steps they would otherwise have to take to find an item they may just have seen (e.g. typing a keyword, and scrolling through the results to find it).

Already, there has been a record number of images and videos being returned as SERP (search engine results page) features this year, and that’s only going to continue to grow.

So, now that we’ve established how rapidly visual search is rising, let’s take a look at how people are using it, what it’s capable of, and how the technology could continue to develop in the future.

How Are Users Engaging with Visual Search?

Take a look below at the top search data for Pinterest Lens in 2017, and we automatically get an idea of the most popular type of searches:

Based on these results, it would appear that fashion and home décor brands have the largest opportunity to capitalise on the rise of image search.

Therefore, it’s perhaps unsurprising that brands including ASOS are optimising themselves for image search. By implementing proprietary technology, ASOS allows shoppers to take photos of an item they find in-store, to see a similar (or even identical match) on asos.com.

Now, we’re going to take a look at some of the top platforms that are making image search possible, and the brands that are utilising them for visual search.

Pinterest is Visual!

One of Pinterest’s primary business focuses is accurate visual search. Pinterest allows users to highlight specific parts of a pin, and find other pins that are visually similar – and this technology has been around since 2014 (that’s two years before Bing introduced the same functionality to its mobile image search in July 2016).

However, more important, is the fact that Pinterest has recently introduced a search function that aims to match discovery to images, as opposed to words.

In Pinterest’s own words, Pinterest Lens “lets you use the camera within your Pinterest app to discover ideas inspired by objects you see out in the real world.”

Pinterest Lens is fast growing as a credible advertising platform, and now this technology is being sold to other brands for them to use on their websites and apps. And when you see the stats, you’ll understand why: 90% of Pinterest users use the platform to make purchase decisions (1), and 78% of Pinners say content from brands on the platform is helpful (2).

For example, with Shop the Look Pins, users can find and buy products in the fashion and home décor pin category, just by selecting a specific part of the image and “shopping the look”.

Unlike Google, Pinterest can focus its entire efforts on the development and monetisation of its visual search engine, which is why it’s becoming the leading name in visual search technology.

Bing and Visual Search

Interestingly, Bing has developed a very similar image search technology to Pinterest, offering smart web-based image search, in addition to image search based on images that have been taken on users’ cameras.

Bing visual search is a useful tool, and it’s significantly enhanced their image search product over the last couple of years – which becomes more evident when you compare it with Google’s current offering.

For example, above is a Bing search for “kitchen decor ideas”, which showcases Bing’s visual search capabilities within their image results. Bing also gives users the ability to narrow in on a specific item in an image, to then search for related objects.

Google and Visual Search

Google has also made a series of moves in recent months in an effort to make their image search simpler to use, and more accessible. One of these efforts includes the release of their own camera-based search, which is originally titled Google Lens.

Currently, the search giant is focusing much of their efforts on further monetising their image results. Since 2016, they’ve been running shopping ads in their image results, and have more recently launched additional features including “shop the look” advertising, and style ideas.

Combined, these efforts have been aimed at enhancing the overall fashion shopper experience – specifically for image search. But Google hasn’t stopped there: they’re also enabling retailers to take advantage of this with an expanded carousel for “similar items” while users are searching for clothes online.

You may have noticed that Google has also updated both their app and mobile results to include badges for image search. For searches now made in the app, users will see a badge in the bottom left-hand corner depicting an image. This badge is shown if the item the user is looking at, can be purchased online.

E-commerce Platforms

Amazon was one of the first companies to give users the option to search by using their smartphone camera. Amazon visual search is specifically aimed at users who are visiting a physical store but are also comparing products online.

Amazon customers can use the camera icon to search for almost anything – for example, you could point the camera at a handbag, and the Amazon app will bring up a list of similar items.

How Can Brands Leverage Visual Search?

Image search is undoubtedly a massive opportunity for brands, and there are many steps these brands can follow in order to leverage their visibility on visual search results; which we’ll outline in more detail below.

Focus on Improving Organic Image Visibility

One aspect of gaining traffic from visual search is to ensure that your visual content ranks high in the image search engine results.

When it comes to search engine optimisation, one subset is optimising for image search; and in order to be successful at this, businesses will need to create a strategy that prioritises and measures the effectiveness of their visual search campaigns.

Build Image Search into Your Web Inventory

Over the last year, Pinterest has rolled out its visual search technology into USA retailer Target’s apps and websites. Part of the deal specified that Target would increase their ad spend with Pinterest and also test out new Pinterest ad formats (3).

The current situation is Pinterest is becoming a service which can power visual search for other products. L2 recently conducted some research which found that only 8% of specialty retail brands have integrated a photo search capability into their apps (4), and this is likely to increase over the coming years.

(Increase) Advertising on Pinterest

61% of Pinterest users have discovered new brands or products from Promoted Pins (5), and half of Pinners made a purchase directly after seeing a Promoted Pin.

If you advertise on Pinterest, you’ll enjoy the benefit of having your ad showing up next to a related product based on visual search technology. As a retailer, you’ll have the opportunity to utilise Promoted Pins and Pinterest Shopping.

How Brands are Leveraging Visual Search Today

Some brands are already leveraging the capabilities of visual search to their advantage. We already mentioned Target’s partnership with Pinterest Lens, but there are other brands who are currently investing in this technology too.

American Eagle Visual AI

American Eagle has invested heavily in chatbot technology which includes the ability to use visual search to query their product catalogue.

The brand is currently developing an artificial intelligence feature that will allow customers to send the bot a photo of an article of clothing, and in return, receive images of matching American Eagle Outfitters products – which are available to purchase directly through Facebook Messenger (6).

Tommy Hilfiger On The Runway

Back in 2017, Tommy Hilfiger launched their visual search app at their Venice Beach fashion show, working in partnership with visual search tech company Slyce. Dubbed as the first app to feature “runway recognition” technology (7), users could purchase the items worn by models on the catwalk via the app – all users had to do was take pictures of the outfits.

B&Q invest in Visual Search

B&Q has invested a lot of time and advertising spend on Pinterest, utilising almost every ad feature available. If you search for interior design inspiration on Pinterest, you’ll likely see eye-catching B&Q advertisements, and it’s these adverts that are no doubt bringing qualified traffic straight to their website.

B&Q has also recently written a co-branded piece with Pinterest on key interior trends, which was subsequently published in The Independent: yet another sign of their close partnership.

To conclude, whilst the rise of voice search may be overshadowing that of visual search, it really isn’t something you can afford to ignore. Start utilising the technology available, and you could soon see an increase in traffic to your website. With several brands already seeing success, visual search is definitely something we would recommend investing time and money in.

Building a website can be an exciting time. It’s a testament to the brand you’re about to build. It will undergo changes as you dynamically grow and shift your business plans, as the years pass on and you measure your success or failings based on the metrics most important to you. But for now, you’re happy with the design, the utility and the availability of your website. But how do you ensure that it generates organic traffic as well as traffic you personally develop through your own promotional efforts?

Are the days of people simply ‘coming across’ what you have to offer over? Or can you optimize how they might find your work, and potentially help you generate those clicks into a form of finalized income? Fear not, for in this article we hope to both inform and assuage the fears you might be having when running your own project for the first time. Perhaps more than registering the business name, purchasing the domain or even developing a product, seeing your website good to go can feel like one of the most defining ‘we’re ready’ moments you may have for your brand. This feeling can be bittersweet because it often comes with the ‘now what?’ set of emotions we are all familiar with.

With the following advice, we hope your ‘now what?’ questions are settled:

Cross-Promotion

Cross-promoting with other websites can be an excellent method of gaining access to a higher pool of available readers or users. Approaching websites similar to yours could potentially help you find networks of websites that all inform one another and share visiting metrics, contribute to shared posts or even review one another’s items. Sign up with an SEO firm for hosted affiliate content can not only help your website stand out with more frequent and quality published content, but with targeted ads that your users might find useful, especially coming from a voice such as yours.

Cross promotion can open you up to plenty of new opportunities, even if you have to take one for the team initially and perhaps offer discount codes for those visiting certain other platforms in order to potentially gain new viewership.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization is among one of the best methods of having your website seen. A layman’s description of hosted SEO is simply. Put simply, it helps you publish your content in ways that is true to your original vision, but can be seen as preferential to a search engine’s keyword algorithms, allowing users to naturally come across what you have to show. And that’s right, the aforementioned SEO affiliate marketing is something you can also benefit from if you have your content placed within the right portals. It’s a harmless, targeted and extremely cost-efficient method of expanding your reach naturally, and with a healthy dose of goodwill. So why not get involved?

Availability

It’s blatantly obvious that for a good fisherman’s trawler to achieve its goal of catching a certain quote of fish a day, the net that is thrown must be in good condition. It mustn’t be thrown when sporting holes, when not fully connected to the boat, or when the winching mechanism is completely stuck and in heavy need of a good oiling.

If your website is the net and the visitors are your fish, it’s important to consider how the availability of your website must be maintained and present at all times. You must open your website to worldwide viewing, even if you don’t ship your products or services to certain countries. You must ensure you use a reliable hosting platform with good security. You must analyze the metrics to ensure you know when to post your content for the maximum reach. It all has an effect. This is where premium website support can serve as the lubricating oil.

Some of these best practices you will learn over time, some are common sense. But none of them can continue without website availability.

Cohesive Offering

Offer a product? Place your website URL in the packaging, and have your customers sign up for an account. Offer a service? Find a way of doing the same. No matter what separate offering is on the table from your firm, ensure your business is always redirected back to in the eyes of your clients. Be sure that it serves as the main hub of your business. It’s then and only then can you potentially gain the full scope of your audience no matter where and when it’s built. Remember, brands need to be cohesive, and the bulk of that starts online.

With these tips, your website should be on its way to acceptable viewership.

6 SEO Experts unpick the nitty gritty and unpick what the big search trends for 2019 will be. Click the links below to learn more and get even more trends!

Mobile First Indexing!

“In a nutshell, mobile-first indexing means that Google uses the mobile version of your page for indexing and ranking. Since March 2018, Google’s started the process of migrating sites to mobile-first index. It might happen that Search Console has already notified you about it.

Bear in mind, a mobile-first index does not mean “mobile-only.” There’s still a single index with both mobile and desktop versions. However, the whole “mobile-first” buzz means that Google will be using the mobile versions for ranking once the site’s migrated.

You get it, right? With your mobile version being the primary one for ranking, there’s no excuse to procrastinate with mobile-friendliness.”

“With AI becoming increasingly important for Google, structured data is becoming more important as well,” Tandler said. “If Google wants to move from a mobile-first to an AI-first world, structured data is key. No matter how good your AI is, if it takes too long to ‘crawl’ the required information, it will never be great. AI requires a fast processing of contents and their relations to each other.”

JP Sherman, enterprise search and findability expert at Red Hat, said you should start looking at and understanding structured data, schema, active and passive search behaviors, and how they can connect to behaviors that signal intent so that the behavior of search becomes a much larger effort of findability.

“Contextual relationships between topics and behaviors, supported by structured markup, is the critical trend we need to start understanding, testing, and implementing for 2019,” Sherman said. “Using information architecture, tags, metadata and more recently, structured markup, we’ve had the ability to give search engines signals to understand this topical and supportive content structure.”

Further, Jamie Alberico, SEO product owner for Arrow Electronics, said you should “leverage your existing content by integrating speakable and fact check structured data markup. These markups are a key link between factual reality and the screenless future.”

With 30% of web browsing expected to go screenless by 2020, this is a major – and still growing – trend to keep optimizing for (Gartner: 2016). Even though this capability has been making the SEO trends lists for some time now, it’s still relevant as ever. That’s because with technology as recent as this, each year brings new developments, as well as more data we can use to understand how exactly listings are being categorized.

Like just this past year, a Backlinko study of 10,000 Google Home results taught us that the system seems to talk up suggestions that are already ranking high on the SERPs, even more so ones that have landed that special 0th place in a featured snippet. We also learned that finding a way to literally write out a question in your content, before moving on to the answer (FAQ page style), seems to perform well on these voice search systems.

The user experience on a website can make or break a deal of any magnitude. Therefore, business owners who would prefer to keep making a profit with their sites will do their best to guarantee a silky smooth UX. That means an easy-to-understand, intuitive design, a low page load time, and absolutely no technical issues.

A website gives a better impression of a business than any advertisement. Never let your most powerful assets tarnish your reputation.